Kaddish

I’ve decided to change my strategy for blogging through Grossman. Not only is it almost impossible to try and successfully capture the first part of the book in any systematic way (the conversation shifts too rapidly and it’s almost maddening to trace any idea), but the second part is so lovely and systematically broken down, that I keep gravitating toward it. So I’ll leave the first part of the book for those of you who desire to read it (very much worth it). Instead I’ll be blogging through Grossman’s “Summa Lyrica,” which is the second part of The Sighted Singer.

Grossman begins his Summa by speaking about immortality:

The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of will….The limits of the autonomy of the will discovered in poetry are death and the barriers against the access to other consciousnesses….The kind of success which poetry facilitates is called “immortality.”…Immortality is the simultaneity of meaning and being. Immortality can be discussed only in relation to persons….Neither immortality nor persons are conceivable outside of communities.

According to Grossman’s understanding, we must first understand that poetry is a tool, a “machine that speaks.” Poetry is not an end in itself (and perhaps, by extension, art is not an end in itself). Yet the purpose it serves is not a political, economic, but rather social. It is “moral work” in service of persons.

This is because the only success that poetry is capable of is that of “immortality.” Thus, it would be impossible to put poetry and art in the service of other ends.

As far as the poetry of immortality, I immeidately think of of Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonographthe rhythm the rhythm–and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer—And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn—Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,the final moment—the flower burning in the Dayand what comes after,looking back on the mind itself that saw an American citya flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed—

What is interesting to me about this poem, is the way that Ginsberg seeks to immortalize not only his mother, but also all the objects that are present in his grief. He names them, and sometimes it seems as if he feels compelled to expand upon them (“Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph”) as a way to help preserve them. I wonder how much Ginsberg’s attempts to preserve objects (ultimately in the service of preserving persons) fits into Grossman’s scheme? Is it possible that Ginsberg is using all these objects to create a sort of pseudo-community, a sense of there-ness, that gives him the ability to speak and preserve his mother?

The idea of community in poetry seems very important. It certainly fits in with my idea that we write more from what we share than from what separates us. Yet Grossman insists also that poetry (indeed poetic knowledge) comes at the price of the abandonment of the will. The poet says “Sing, muse…” and hence gives up something in order to speak with the gravitas (and knowledge) of the transcendent.I am less enthusiastic about this latter idea. Grossman says in his conversations with Halliday that this poetic daimon is “the voice not of the self but of that transcendental artifice that I have formally called ‘personhood.'” A speaker seeks to attain personhood (and hence immortality). Yet this can only be possible if the speaker is willing to give up “self” and allow it to be overcome by that which is transcendental. This is where Grossman’s distinction between “self” and “person” gets dicey for me. If self is what I am, my consciousness (in the Freudian sense, I suppose), then where does this “person” come from, and how much is it actually me? What makes us willing to give up self for person in poetry? I suppose it is the attempt to breach the limits of our autonomous wills (death).

Some of this unease also has to do with my unease of the Freudian conception of self. Let me quote from JPII’s essay “Thomistic Personalism”:

A hallmark of Descartes’ view of his splitting of the human being into an extended substance (the body) and a thinking substance (the soul), which are related to one another in a parallel way and do not form an undivided whole. We can observe in philosophy a gradual process of a kind of hypostatization of consciousness: consciousness becomes an independent subject of activity, and indirectly of existence, occuring somehow alongside the body, which is a material structure subject to the laws of nature, to natural determinism. Against the background of such parallelism, combined with simultaneous hypostatization of consciousness, the tendency arises to identify the person with consciousness.

What Grossman refers to as “self,” I think, is what JPII describes as the result of the “hypostatization of consciousness.” I suspect Grossman is trying to get past the inherent limits of the Cartesian view of the human being by thinking of “Person” as some sort of transcendental leap that is allowed by the “machinery” of the poem. Yet, I suspect this distinction between person and self is not ultimately helpful and only furthers the unhelpful Cartesian formulation. For Grossman, persons are value bearing, undeniably moral. Yet the modern emphasis on consciousness is inherently subjective. Hence he must find a way to valorize the person over and above limits of consciousness. Poetry, he believes, allows him to do this.

Yet it seems to me to come at a cost: the moral person is still an admitted fiction. Doesn’t this designation of “fiction” castrate Grossman’s project? Why must we value the fiction over the reality? Is reality not actually beautiful?